The Difference Between Bellheads and Netheads

The IEEE has given the effort to develop 100 Gbps Ethernet its official support. Some network equipment vendors had argued for 40Gbps, 80Gbps and 120Gbps speeds, in line with synchronous digital hierarchy. But Ethernet always has been designed around factors of 10, or an order of magnitude improvement, all the way from its first incarnation at 10 Mbps in the 1970s.

So here's the suggestive comparison. Netheads design around orders of magnitude of change, every time there's an upgrade. Bellheads tend to want increases to match the legacy base. There's nothing wrong with that. There simply are different assumptions about what "next version" of bandwidth growth should entail.

There are other parallels in life. Established businesses would be happy with incremental growth in the tens of percent. Venture capitalists won't bother with any innovation that promises anything less than an order of magnitude performance improvement over the existing state of the art.

Again, some endeavors in life are geared around incremental improvements while others are organized around at least an order of magnitude change. Not surprisingly, VC-backed efforts frequently are disruptive, specifically because that's what they aim to do. Established organizations frequently grow at 10s of percent rates, precisely because that's what they aim to do.

If Netheads and Bellheads tend to produce different results, it is at least in part because they aim to do different things. Bellheads aim for incremental change. Netheads, riding Moore's Law, aim for orders of magnitude change on a sustained basis. Which is why the global tension in the communications business isn't going away. There will be no possibility of easy stability. Not when some value chain participants live in a world of incremental change while others live in a world where an order of magnitude is the normal rate of change.

That isn't to say end users immediately see all those improvements. There are some physical constraints in the infrastructure world that make Moore's Law improvements in the access plant tough, if easier in the wide area network and relatively simple in the device arena.